New place to call home

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/04/2012 (5152 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

GYPSUMVILLE — The last time Gordon Traverse Jr. had a home to call his own was 11 months ago.

So moving day this Easter to a temporary evacuation site at St. Martin’s Junction had the grandfather nearly bouncing off the walls in excitement.

“I’ve been here,” he tapped his watch, “four hours? They’re moving in our furniture. We’re still waiting for Atlas Van Lines,” he said.

As he looked around a new three-bedroom bungalow, one of 12 ready for occupancy on the former radar base near Gypsumville, he eagerly pointed out satellite cable outlets in each bedroom.

“I asked them to put outlets in each room and they did,” he said, happily posing for photographs with his two young daughters and his wife, Shirley Traverse.

His daughter has the house across the street. His niece, the one next door.

The development looks like the suburbs, except it’s 300 kilometres north of the nearest ‘burb in Winnipeg, on Highway 6, a few kilometres south of the Lake St. Martin First Nation.

Traverse has been a spokesman for the hundreds of First Nations people on their journey as evacuees who lost their homes to flooding last spring.

For the next 10 months, entire families would report being shuttled from one hotel to another, spending on average of three months in each.

Traverse arranged to use his family’s evacuation entitlements to rent a house in the North End to provide some stability.

His grown-up daughter, Dianne, now across the street, wasn’t as lucky. With a partner and two small boys, Dianne gave birth to a third child, another son, while the family was living in a Winnipeg hotel.

“For the sake of my little boys, I didn’t like being in a hotel. I was at the Marlborough for the first few months, then I moved to the Greenwood and from September to March I was at the Thrift Lodge,” Dianne said quietly.

This winter, Traverse sat vigil at his father’s bedside after Gordon Traverse told his family he’d never make it home again.

It was heartbreaking, Traverse said.

After his father’s death, it was time to look to the future.

“I had lots of reasons for moving,” Traverse said. “The health of my children and myself. There was too much violence in the city of Winnipeg.”

But don’t get him wrong. Traverse said he’s grateful for the province’s help.

“I’m very happy for what they did for me out there in Winnipeg, but for my well-being, and the health of my children, I had to come home,” he said.

Behind his joy, there’s uncertainty. Occupancy here is temporary; it started March 15 and will end when evacuee funding stops. And then there are some disturbing rumours that follow evacuees as they move out of the city.

Traverse acknowledged that just like the numbers of Lake St. Martin evacuees in hotels mysteriously swelled, the word is the list for homes is getting longer, too.

“I’ve been hearing rumours that people living in Winnipeg, all of a sudden they’re all evacuees. And I don’t know why they’re doing this, but the ones who left Lake St. Martin, some of them who were not original evacuees, are going to get houses.”

Traverse said even talking about the subject will rub some the wrong way.

“People are going to be mad at me for saying this. Somebody is going to call me on the phone and they’re going to say, ‘Why did you say those things. You’re making us look bad.’ “

But it’s not fair, Traverse said, to abuse the system and spoil it for legitimate evacuees.

“My son is still living in a hotel and he’s waiting to come home.”

alexandra.paul@freepress.mb.ca

A dozen families traded hotel rooms for brand-new houses on an old radar base near Gypsumville.

Stalwarts are pumping water again at Lake St. Martin and landowners with thousands of acres for sale wonder if the displaced First Nation will really move to higher ground.

In Winnipeg, flood evacuees who filed suit against the province last week are only part of the story as the First Nations face their second spring without homes. The Winnipeg Free Press paid a visit to the Lake St. Martin area just before Easter.